The blood-tempered tradition of European revolution facilitated the rise of the Weimar republic in a convoluted, indirect manner, leaving its people unsatisfied with their newfound power. This would ultimately open the door for the Nazi regime – easily the most horrid element of Germany’s past, and also the most despised. The land of Germany, which had nourished Germanic peoples since before time, found itself transformed into a gigantic, squirming insect – unlovable by even those who had loved it. It had become Gregor Samsa. And so it was with Michael Berg, torn between a desire to love his nation, and the overwhelming desire to hate its past."And I know I’m reading one of the finest statements ever made on alienation and cruelty, on how we kill those whom we will not love and will not try to save. . . . As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect." (Kafka, 3,67)
"I wanted simultaneously to understand Hanna’s crime and to condemn it." (Schlink, 157)
T.he desire to understand is an enlightened one. It requires more of the heart and soul than the desire to continue, predominant in lower thought. Understanding requires compassion, beauty, and truth in greatly taxing quantities. Yet its results are not always equal to the energy expended in achieving them, so that a true quest for understanding is very rare. Michael’s search for understanding is born of his love for Hannah. He wishes to condemn Hannah, too, because she had taken part in the horrid events of Germany’s past: a vastly different emotion from that of longing to understand. Condemnation is reserved for criminals and vagabonds who commit nameless, iniquitous acts of vagrancy and inhumanity. They are dissociated from the fold, quarantined, and made an example. There is no room for understanding in condemnation, and so there is a primary conflict in Michael’s search for both understanding and condemnation. Like Gregor’s mother, unable to look upon her beloved son, Michael can not reconcile his love for Hannah with his hatred of the Nazis.
Yet Hannah is more than a trinket of young love – she is a symbol of Germany’s ragged past. Typical among the German people, her political disassociation, spawned from her illiteracy, allowed her to be swept along with the Nazi Tide. She was part of a slowly fading gray area in Nazi culture that consisted of neither perpetrator nor victim: far from either innocent or guilty. Michael did not know this. He knew simply that she was beautiful, thrilling, and vibrant; ultimately, he saw her as pristine, like Germany itself before the terrible knowledge of the Holocaust. Assuming these things, he fell in love. A schoolboy, he had not yet learned of the War’s truth. He could not know better. Both Germany and Hannah, t.o him, were wonderful things that might have no past except for the second that had just slipped by.
So it was with great surprise that Michael discovered Hannah was a Nazi. Obviously, by now, he knew of the tragedies of the Holocaust and comprehended the need to persecute its perpetrators. This, however, was surely his initial junction between past and present; the one that allowed him to realize his Germany and the Germany that instituted the Holocaust were one and same. This is the epitome of the aforementioned conflict in Michael’s gestalt: Hannah, his once-love, had become that gigantic, squirming insect of German past. His knowledge offered him no coping method against this fatal conflict. He hated the Nazis. He loved Hannah. He loved Germany, too, but he hated its past – two things as .irreconcilable as his search for condemnation and understanding.
Ultimately, everyone must recognize the imperfection of humanity, and come to terms with it. There is no feasible alternative. To attempt to hide the past would be disgraceful to its dark memory, and would keep a gigantic insect locked away, waiting for release.